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My mom says I'm her sugarplum.
My mom says I'm her lamb.
My mom says I'm completely perfect
Just the way I am.
My mom says I'm a super-special wonderful terrific little guy.
M...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. author and poet. If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries (1981).
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But it's hard to be hip over thirty
When everyone else is nineteen,
When the last dance we learned was the Lindy,
And the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbra Streisand
Were...
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Judith Viorst (b. 1935), U.S. poet, journalist. "It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty," in It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married L...
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Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating—the quintessential model of tw...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. author and poet. Necessary Loses, ch. 3 (1986).
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The need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever. And as long as we, not our mother, initiate parting, and as long as our mother remains reliably there, it seems possib...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. author and poet. Necessary Loses, ch. 3 (1986).
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Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends swee...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. novelist and poet. Necessary Losses, ch. 14 (1986).
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Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. novelist and poet. Necessary Losses, ch. 9 (1986).
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Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and skills to get what we want ...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. novelist and poet. Necessary Losses, ch. 11 (1986).
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Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone—childhood's end. We have left a safe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world wh...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. novelist and poet. Necessary Losses, ch. 10 (1986).
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''Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.''
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. novelist and poet. Necessary Losses, ch. 10 (1986).
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Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love—and its partner, hate. Our father—our "second other"Melaborates on them. Offering us an alternative to the mother-baby relationship . . . pre...
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Judith Viorst (20th century), U.S. novelist and poet. Necessary Losses, ch. 5 (1986).
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Mother Doesn't Want a Dog
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Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they smell,
And never sit when you say sit,
Or even when you yell.
And when you come home late at night
And there is ice and snow,
You have to go back out because
The dumb dog has to go.
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Poets
